The Ship of Fools

The stern Brant did not have a very high regard for the sensual pleasures procurable in the streets of Basel. The prologue to his fiftieth poem, Of Sensual Pleasure, expresses his self-righteous scorn  

The stupid oft by lust are felled And by their wings are firmly held For many, this their end hath spelled. 

Romantic night music was also verboten-ber 62 Of Serenading at Night  

The man who d play the amorous wight And sing a serenade at night Invites the frost to sting and bite. 

But let there not forgotten be Our quite deceptive alchemy Pure gold and silver doth it yield But this in ladles was concealed. 

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Brant, Sebastian.The ship of fools, translated by Alexander Barclay. Edited by T.H. Jamieson. Translated by Alexander Barclay. Edinburgh William Paterson, 1874. 

As Zeydel explains in his annotation to this passage, "The word is guck-uss. There may be a pun involved. The cuckoo might refer to the foolishness of the alchemist, to the fact that he, like the cuckoo, lays his eggs in others nests to be hatched, and the word gucken, to look or to peep, may also be in Brant s mind." Zeydel, The Ship of Fools, 388 n. 6. 

The Ship of Fools, by Sebastian Brant, Edited and translated by Edwin H. 

FIGURE 65. Our quite deceptive alchemist from The Ship of Fools. This figure is from the 1506 Basel edition, from The Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical... 

S. Brant, The Ship of Fools, translated into rhyming couplets with introduction and commentary by Edwin H. Zeydel, Dover Publications, New York, 1962 (reprint of 1944 edition). 

This day is also called Dorsetshire and Fools clay, Poole being the port of shipment It is obtained chiefly from the neighborhood of Wareham, and large quantities are shipped annually fox Staffordshire and other parts of the United Kingdom. 

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